The United States Postal System (“USPS”), despite its faults, is the envy of the civilized world. Technology is making this good system even better. One-way technology has advanced the services offered by the USPS is by providing postage meter systems that can be operated in businesses and homes and do not need to be connected to the USPS local office to operate. That is, these postage meter systems enable a user to run media past a postage meter device with a print head so as to deposit postage indicia on an item to be mailed. This eliminates the need for using stamps and/or for taking the media to the Post Office for “metering.”
Nonetheless, these advances have brought new, time-consuming, difficulties into the office place. One of the major difficulties associated with these meter systems known in the art is accounting for postage charged for use of the system when, in fact, no postage indicia was printed. This is not an infrequent occurrence in offices utilizing these postage meter systems. In fact, this happens quite often for a variety of reasons among which are that the system is out of postage, out of ink, a paper jam has occurred or the print head itself has malfunctioned. In any event, for whatever reason, today when an item to be mailed has been passed through a postage meter system print head and no postage indicia in fact was printed, a user faces a time-consuming and tedious task to be reimbursed for postage charged for, but not received. Essentially, the task requires the user to create documentary evidence that the postage meter system has malfunctioned and the user was charged for postage not received and to present this evidence to the USPS for reimbursement.